Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones A.R.A. 1833-1898

Christie’s, The Remaining Works from the Studio of the Late Sir Edward Coly Burne-Jones, 5 June 1919, part of lot 175 (with Ananias and Azarius);

Bought by Gooden and Fox, for £178. 10s, for Lord Leverhulme, who paid £182. 19s. 3d.;

His sale, Knight Frank & Rutley, 15 June 1926, lot 19;

Given by the second Lord Leverhulme to the King’s Weigh-House Church;

Mr Benjamin Guinness, 11 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1;

Duca de Mignano;

London, Sotheby’s, 8 June 1993, lot 47;

Private collection

Edward Morris, Victorian & Edwardian Paintings in the Lady Lever Art Gallery; British Artists Born After 1810 Excluding the Early Pre-Raphaelites, 1994, pp.19-20;

A. Charles Sewter, The Stained Glass of William Morris and His Circle – A Catalogue, 1975, pp.133-134

The dramatic figure of Misael was conceived for one of the three main lights in the West window of All Saints Church at Middleton Cheney in Northamptonshire, the decoration of which Burne-Jones had begun in 1865 when he designed the windows in the chancel of the East window. Misael was designed as part of a later scheme executed in 1870, with the main panels depicting the attempted execution of Misael, Ananais and Azarius. The biblical story of Misael, Ananias and Azarius (better known as Mesach, Shadrach and Abednego) is told in The Song of the Three Holy Children, in the Book of Daniel, chapter 3. It tells how Nebuchadnezzar King of Bablyon, had cast the three brothers into a fiery furnace for refusing to worship the Persian idols. Protected by the Lord, the brothers walked unscathed from the fire to convert the King to Christianity. Burne-Jones depicts the faithful figures untouched by the flames, protected by the power of God and undisturbed by their peril.

At All Saints, the stained glass panel of Misael is flanked by large lights depicting Ananias and Azarius and surmounted by six tracery panels depicting The Days of Creation, as represented in the famous set of painted panels now in the Winthrop Collection in Harvard. According to Burne-Jones’ account book, he was engaged upon work on the windows in July 1870, although it has been suggested that the paintings of Misael, Ananias and Azarias were painted at a later date as independent art works and possibly completed by studio assistants.

The subject of martyrdom and the conversion of a pagan, had been depicted before in Burne-Jones painting Theophilus and the Angel of 1867, which depicts the moment when the Roman scribe is converted to Christianity after the execution of Saint Dorothea, whose death he had ordered. Martyrdom was one of the great inspirational themes for Burne-Jones and he depicted several martyr saints in his stained glass panels, including Saint Dorothy (Sotheby’s, 12 June 2003, lot. 32). The present work depicts the stoic martyr, calm and composed like the Saint Sebastians of the Renaissance, which Burne-Jones so admired on his visits to Italy and closer to home at the National Gallery in London.

The stained glass figures of the bound martyrs Misael, Ananias and Azarius, are clothed in billowing fabric, reciprocating the movement of the flames. For the easel paintings, Burne-Jones stripped the figures and omitted their bonds, emphasising the monumentality of the figures and the vulnerability of the exposed human flesh to the blistering heat of the fire. The classically beautiful male nudes are illuminated by the light of the furnace, but remain untouched as the defiant flames engulf the space around them. The force of the dramatic contrast between the solidity of flesh and the twisting wave of flames is dynamic and this is made all the more powerful by the strong verticality of the figure and the simplicity of the composition. The effect is similar to the greatest work by the European Symbolists, who were so influenced by such works by Burne-Jones.

In September 1870, whilst Burne-Jones was engaged upon work at All Saints, John Ruskin planned to give a lecture upon the subject of The Relation Between Michael Angelo and Tintoret and asked Burne-Jones’ advise upon his first draft which criticised the work of Michelangelo. Burne-Jones was devastated by Ruskin’s opinion on the work of his new hero and wrote, ‘He read it to me just after he had written it, and as I went home I wanted to drown myself in the Surrey canal or get drunk in a tavern – it didn’t seem worth while to strive any more if he could think it and write it". In September 1871, Burne-Jones made an artistic pilgrimage to Rome, to make an extensive study of the Sistine ceiling. Georgina Burne-Jones recorded in her Memorials that, her husband ‘bought the best opera-glass he could find, folded his railway rug thickly, and, lying on his back, read the ceiling from beginning to end, peering into every corner and revelling in its execution’. After the trip to Italy in 1871, Burne-Jones wrote to his friend Charles Eliot Norton, ‘I love Da Vinci and Michaelangelo most of all’ (Martin Harrison and Bill Waters, Burne-Jones, 1973, p. 1057). He returned to Italy in 1873 with William Morris and on his return, continued to paint with much of the spirit of Renaissance art throughout the 1870s.

The influence of Michelangelo upon the work of Burne-Jones in the 1870s was enormously important and resulted in a change of style to a more full-bodied and muscular style. Like The Cumaean Sibyl of 1877 (Sotheby's, 28th November 2002, lot 25), Misael beautifully expresses Burne-Jones admiration for Michelangelo in the constriction of the pictorial space, powerfully architectural in the placement of the figure. The naked male form, dramatically shaded and moulded with crisp dark outlines and sensual undulations of masculine muscle, is very like the ignudi of the Sistine ceiling, which Burne-Jones greatly admired. The marble plinth upon which Misael is standing, as though enshrined for eternity amid the flames, is based upon the architectural pediments upon which Michelangelo’s Sibyls and Prophets reside. The plinth also suggests the base of a statue, as though marble had just turned to flesh as in Burne-Jones Pygmalion series of pictures, in which the statue Galatea is brought to life by the flames of Venus. The poses of Misael, Ananias and Azarius bear a strong resemblance to the marble of Michelangelo, particularly the Slaves, with their hands tied behind them and contraposed with an elegant sensuality. The Car of Love of 1870 (Victoria and Albert Museum, London) and the various versions of The Wheel of Fortune (Musee d’Orsay, Paris) and The Depths of the Sea (Private Collection and the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts), are also all very much indebted to these statues, in the constraint of the bound muscular male figures.

Another great champion of Michelangelo was John Addington Symonds who wrote in Italian Renaissance (1875-86) a description of Michaelangelo’s nudes which it has been pointed out, also applies to those of Burne-Jones; ‘The grace of colouring realised in some of these youthful and athletic forms, is such as no copy can represent. Every posture of beauty and of strength, simple or strained, that it is possible for men to assume, has been depicted here. Yet the whole is governed by a strict sense of sobriety.’ (Martin Harrison and Bill Waters, Burne-Jones, 1973, p. 105).

Ananias, Azarius and Misael have an impressive provenance, having been purchased from Burne-Jones’ studio sale in 1919 for one of the greatest collections of Victorian art ever formed, that of the soap magnate Viscount Leverhulme in Merseyside. Ananias and Azarius remain at the gallery founded by Leverhulme in honour of his wife, the Lady Lever Art Gallery at Port Sunlight, whilst Misael was given to the King’s Weigh-House Church in 1926, after Lever’s death. It appears to have made its way into the collection of the Guinness family in the later 1920s, when it hung at 11 Carlton House Terrace, remodelled by Sir Edward Lutyens for Benjamin Guinness. Misael does not appear to have ever been exhibited or reproduced other than in sale catalogues.